Syndication:

On Saturday, January 26, Texas held a special State Senate election, 6th district, in Houston. Here are the election returns, from the Secretary of State’s web page. Parties did not have nominees, but party labels appeared on the ballot. Although not all provisional and absentee ballots have been counted, all precincts have reported, and it appears only 6% of the registered voters participated. The district has 284,000 registered voters.

15 Responses

There are too many elections, too many campaigns and too many offices to be chosen by voters in America. As a result, the voters are burned out by the process.

Voters want to participate in the November elections, once every two years for important offices – and that’s enough.

It is this reality that the “top-two” cabal is trying to exploit – by holding a single-party primary and building a one-party state-controlled election system.

Under “top-two” the early single-party primary will be largely ignored and easily controlled by the government-party bosses. Then with only two candidates allowed in the general election – both chosen by the single-party bosses, or even one candidate if they can arrange it with further restrictions – the voters will have their pretend election, unaware that the whole event is a preplanned charade.

It seems to me that these special elections that get low voter turn out would be a good opportunity for a well organized Libertarian Party or some other minor party or independent candidate to get elected.

#5 One of the candidates, Susan Delgado, was the Libertarian nominee for the seat in 2008. She had filed for the Libertarian nomination in 2012, but the party declined to nominate her. This special election she ran as a Democrat and finished 8th.

The Green candidate in this race finished 7th, and the independent 6th. All these candidates did better on election day than in early voting – so in some sense they were variant spellings of None of The Above for voters who were performing their civic duty, but really didn’t know who to vote for. This pattern was also true for the two Republican candidates.

So the challenge would be to do an exceptionally good job of identifying the True Believers and getting 100% of them to vote, and getting them to convince a friend to vote for the candidate as well; or to run a high-intensity media campaign with a personable candidate who doesn’t seem like a politician (eg Jesse Ventura when he ran for governor in Minnesota).

Sec. ZZZ. (1) A legislative body candidate or member may file a written rank order list of persons to fill his/her vacancy, if any.
(2) The qualified person who is highest on the list shall fill the vacancy.
(3) If the preceding does not happen, then the legislative body shall fill the vacancy with a person of the same party (if any) immediately at its next meeting.
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This stuff ain’t atomic physics.

Too many ANTI-Democracy devil monsters trying to get monarchs/oligarchs into total control.
See 7 Dec 1941.
See 11 Sep 2001 — aka 911.

i.e. now quite possible for a surprise mass attack on a major legislative body.

Too many delusional amateurs on this list who love the political cancer systems in the U.S.A. — gerrymanders, Electoral College, party hack primaries, etc. — and love having statutory fixes – IRV, Top 2, NPV, etc.

The EVIL system is ANTI-Democracy top to bottom.

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P.R. and nonpartisan App.V. — like getting rid of slavery and divine right of kings.